


You Run

by marauder_in_warblerland



Category: Glee
Genre: Gen, M/M, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-18
Updated: 2014-03-18
Packaged: 2018-01-16 03:32:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1330321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marauder_in_warblerland/pseuds/marauder_in_warblerland
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a spoiler for 5.15 (see notes for full summary)</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Run

**Author's Note:**

> Summary: Kurt’s put himself in the hospital for a stranger and, for the life of him, Burt cannot understand why.
> 
> Warnings for homophobia, discussions of violence, and references to Finn Hudson.

“What on earth were you thinking?” His voice echoes in the silence of the hospital room, and Kurt flinches at the sudden sound.

“Dad—“

“No, don’t _Dad_ me.” Burt sits beside Kurt’s bed, hands on the side rails, but his fingers say that he wants to be pacing. They twitch, tapping out a silent staccato beat as he keeps talking, voice as measured as he can manage.

“You don’t get to shut this down, not when you were bleeding and, according to the paramedics, there— there was a lot of blood, Kurt.”

His voice breaks and he reaches forward to wrap Kurt into a careful hug. It’s awkward, hunched over the side of the bed, avoiding the tender spots on his ribs and up the side of his arm. Kurt leans in anyway and breathes in the musty smoke ground into his father’s jacket. Burt needs a second to get himself together and that, he thinks, is the least he can do.

While Burt rubs slow circles into his back, Kurt stares at the now-familiar hospital wall over his father’s shoulder. Insipid framed pictures of sailboats float just above eye level towards nowhere in particular, the print too watery for any one time or place.  Some patients must appreciate that sense of being absolutely nowhere, he thinks. Hospitals are all muted colors, muted sounds, muted everything; the space turns terror into whispers, until he could almost forget what the concrete felt like under the back of his head.

His dad held out for a long time, all things considered. Two days ago, when Kurt first woke up, groggy and light-headed, he’d thought that he’d dreamt his dad into the room, because Burt never said anything. Blaine and Carole took turns fussing over his blankets and the angle of the bed, but his dad just sat there, holding his hand and mumbling his name like an incantation.

It took a day for Kurt to get his bearings. By the time he could sit up and eat a meal like a grown up, he could already feel the tension radiating off of his father in waves. Burt wanted to say something. It was eating at him, but Kurt could tell that he didn’t know how, not with his son sitting there in a hospital gown, tubes sticking out of his skin like a horror show.

So instead, he watched and, just like in high school, that bewildered stare made Kurt feel like an alien in his own skin.

They’d been alone when the nurse— Kurt thought his name was Kevin—brought in his lunch on a little plastic tray. It hit the table over the bed with a clatter and the sound shook something out of his dad that had been building up for days. That’s when the questions started, questions Kurt still doesn’t know how to answer.

In the here and now, Burt pulls away from the hug and peers into his face with a furrowed brow. After a minute, Kurt starts to feel like a particularly troublesome spark plug.

“I thought that you were smarter than this,” he says, and Kurt takes the hit like a punch in the gut. “I thought that after Karofsky and that thing with the tall, preppy kid and the slushy that you would know that you don’t confront a bully. You call 911 or, I don’t know, scream. You definitely don’t get in the middle of something this dangerous.”

Kurt thinks about his dad slamming Karofsky up against a wall and doesn’t say anything. He shrugs and stares down at the sheets, like the little boy he’s suddenly become.

Burt shakes his head. “Don’t give me that. We were terrified, me and Carole. I know she seems like she has everything together, but you didn’t see her when we got the call—”

“It’s what he would have done,” Kurt blurts out. Maybe it’s the disappointment in his dad’s voice, but he feels reckless. “Finn would have been down that alley in a second—”

“No.” Burt’s hand comes down so fast the food cups rattle in their plastic compartments. “Don’t you dare bring him into this. Do you know how much that matters right now? It doesn’t. It doesn’t even matter a little bit, because _we could have lost you too_.”

“You didn’t though.” Kurt says, his voice quiet, buried under his father’s grief. “You didn’t lose me. You weren’t ever going to lose me.”

Burt tries to jump in, but Kurt barrels through. 

“I didn’t break any bones. My internal organs are still as pristine as ever. I’m going to come out of this with my _pas de poisson_ intact and, you know what? So is that guy who was getting his head bashed in on the sidewalk.”

He stops, eyes blazing and Burt just gapes, sad and flabbergasted. “What, did you want to be some big, strong hero? Because I didn’t think that was your brand of stupid, kiddo.”

“No,” Kurt sighs, his voice laced with irritation. “I don’t have some latent hero complex for you to worry about. Capes don’t work on my figure.”

He sighs and rubs his eyes. The lights are giving him a headache, or maybe that was someone’s fists.

“Dad, do you remember when I told you that Blaine doesn’t really like school dances?”

Burt glances up at the ceiling in thought and then nods slowly. “Sure I do.”

“I never explained why, did I?”

“Kurt, I’m not sure this is the best—“

“If you want me to explain,” he snaps. “This is how it has to happen. I promise it’s relevant.”

Burt gestures at him to _go ahead_ , and Kurt takes a deep breath, eyes focused down on his own hands. “I don’t know what you thought, but he didn’t just have a bad experience with a boutonniere.”

Burt huffs out a laugh under his breath.

“He— he got hurt,” Kurt continues. “At his school before Dalton, some guys basically beat the daylights out of him and his date. That’s why he went to Dalton in the first place.”

Burt sits back in surprise. “Before Dalton, but he must have been—”

“Tiny? Young? Completely vulnerable? Yeah, he was fourteen and those thugs put him in a cast for weeks.”

“Was it—?” Burt doesn’t need to finish the thought.

“Of course. He was too gay for their sidewalk or their line of sight, so they left him on the pavement for more than two hours. He said that by the time the chaperone found them, he was unconscious. He woke up in a hospital room a lot like this one, actually.”

“God Kurt, no wonder he looked like a ghost when he walked in here.” Burt rubs his head as the pieces fall into place. “Did you think about that when you went barreling off into some alley to confront a psychopath? Did you even think—”

“About him?” Kurt chokes out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob. “About— that’s all I could—He was a _kid_.” Kurt looks up from the blankets and watches his father’s face fall. He doesn’t know what his own face must look like, but he feels tears prick at the corners of his eyes.

“Yeah,” Kurt breathes. “The boy in the alley was little and he had dark hair, and all I could see was some time-warped version of _my fiancé_ on the ground, getting the shit beaten out of him by men three times his size. Of course I didn’t think! I ran, because that’s what you do when your family needs you. I don’t care if it’s unbelievably stupid, that’s _what you do_.”

He sucks in a breath and blinks back down at the bed. “I learned that from you,” he says, half to himself, “from you and from Carole. If that kid had looked like me or Finn, can you honestly tell me you would have just called the cops?”

Burt doesn’t say no, but he doesn’t say yes either. He doesn’t have to. Kurt stares a hole into the blue hospital blanket until he feels his father’s fingers sweeping the hair away from his forehead and off to the side.

When he looks up, his dad’s already standing to welcome Blaine back from his run to the hospital cafeteria. They’ve all gotten to know the usual offerings: what’s safe to eat and what isn’t worth the risk. Blaine sets three different pieces of cake on the side table and they fall into the usual, easy patter. Has the doctor stopped by? Is his favorite nurse on duty? When will Kurt be up for a visit to see the newborns?

Burt doesn’t say anything about dark hair or a tiny boy on the pavement, and neither does Kurt. Blaine doesn’t need to know. Not right now.

And if Kurt sees his dad hugging his future son-in-law a little longer than usual, well then that can just be their little secret. 

**Author's Note:**

> This is not intended as prediction or speculation. I look forward to seeing (and crying through) the canonical scene that turns this story into an AU.
> 
> Thanks to my betas, gluttonouspenguin and amongsoulsandshadows, for their support and mad skillz.


End file.
